Watching Whales Watching Us in California

Joel Reynolds

Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Posted July 13, 2009 in Reviving the World's Oceans , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

In New York Times Magazine ("Watching Whales Watch Us"), author Charles Siebert lays out a compelling case for what many people have long suspected: that great whales are conscious, social, interactive animals with complex social structures and cultures. The article is beautifully written and full not just of anecdotes of remarkable whale-human interactions but interviews with leading scientists who have documented that whales teach, learn, cooperate, grieve, and even use tools in their quest for food.

Using the 'friendly gray whales" at Laguna San Ignacio on the west coast of Baja California as the touchstone, Siebert covers a range of topics in making his case -from military sonar (calling NRDC's litigation to control it a "turning point" in the relationship between humans and whales) to commercial whaling to personal and historical anecdotes of interactions with these massive creatures in the wild. He suggests the remarkable proposition that these ancient creatures, once hunted virtually to extinction by humans, may somehow have learned now to forgive and even trust us, in spite of our centuries-old efforts to slaughter their ancestors for oil and other whale byproducts. Siebert argues that whale-human relations have long been characterized by a "stark dualism: manic swings between mythologizing and massacre; between sublime awe and assiduous annihilation, the testimonies of their slayers often permeated with a deep sense of both remorse and respect for the victims."

And nowhere is this more clearly the case than at Laguna San Ignacio.

At this extraordinary place - now a World Heritage Site, a biosphere reserve, and the last undisturbed breeding and calving lagoon of the California gray whale - this large baleen species that migrates each year along the west coast from Alaska was hunted by whalers like Charles Scammon, who would trap the calves in the shallow lagoon as a means of enticing the full-grown mothers within range for harpooning. After reaching near-extinction at levels below 1,000 whales, the species began to rebound when commercial whaling was outlawed in the mid to late 20th Century, with the eastern Pacific gray whale stock now reaching an estimated 18,000 gray whales at least - one of the most dramatic recoveries of any large whale species. It is in this lagoon today that whale-watchers come every winter to ride the protected waters to see and even touch 40-ton, 45-feet long wild animals and their babies in their natural habitat.

As but one example of the continuing, post-commercial whaling threats to these magnificent animals, it was in this lagoon that, in the 1990's, Mitsubishi Corporation and the government of Mexico proposed to build the world's largest industrial salt works - 116-square miles of industrial development, with 17 enormous diesel pumps sucking 6,000 gallons per second from the lagoon 24-hours a day; a million-ton stockpile of salt; a two-kilometer pier into the Bay of Whales where ocean-going tankers would dock to receive the salt for transport to Japan; and billions of gallons of toxic salt brine, stored in ponds adjacent to the lagoon and eventually dumped into coastal waters. Together with the largest environmental coalition ever formed in Mexico and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, NRDC mounted the largest public campaign in its history to challenge and, against tremendous odds, ultimately defeat the salt works project. Now, ten years after President Zedillo of Mexico announced that the project would be abandoned, NRDC and a coalition of international and Mexican non-profits have undertaken a conservation initiative to preserve in perpetuity one million acres around the lagoon through easements and land acquisition - to ensure that the whales will be protected from a return of the salt works project or any other major development.

This is a success story, but the international struggle to protect and restore whale populations around the globe will never end. Charles Siebert's article is a powerful statement of why that struggle, by NRDC and others, is essential.

Some Basic Scientific Facts about Whale and Dolphin Consciousness

This is an excerpt taken from David Noha:

I have seen numerous statistics on whale and dolphin brains; unfortunately these are the kinds of statistics that people get emotional about and hence tend to exaggerate. Several smart science authors I trust have repeated this general point: neuron counts in the neocortex are about ten times higher in humans than chimps, about the same in humans and bottlenosed dolphins, and some whales have up to ten times as many as humans. Of course neurons have synapses, around 5000 per in humans (increasing with age) and I haven't seen numbers on cetacean or sirenian synapse counts.

What "consciousness" is, of course, is not a question we have one solid answer to. Symbolic reasoning may be a better characteristic to consider. Those who argue against animal reasoning typically cite primate research and ignore dolphin research. Dolphins have certainly been shown to have the capability of understanding sentence structure and prepositional relations.

For me, the deeper moral issue is decided by the principle of parsimony (akin to Occam's Razor). If the preponderance of evidence suggests that whales and dolphins may be conscious, we shouldn't be murdering them. Since we can identify the neocortex as the seat of consciousness, or at least symbolic reasoning, and we can observe a rough correlation between cortical complexity and behavioral complexity, I think it's rather obvious that we should look before we leap/kill for the two classes of animals with neocortices similar in complexity to humans: dolphins and whales.

Another Voice for Animal Consciousness

I know that I am not alone in my thoughts. There many like me, but not necessarily willing to put up a blog about animals. All the same, it does me good to see their thoughts and the thinking:

After reading some articles (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=animal+consciousness) on animal consciousness, I was surprised to find that so many scientists, psychologists and philosphers regard almost every animal but homo sapein as completely unconscious. They were making arguments such as animals feel pain, but they don't know they feel pain, basically they reposnd as if they feel pain, but they are not really experiencing it. Some of them, referred to as Cartesians, were theorizing that consciousness did not evolve until the development of art and other forms of culture in the Upper Paleolithic. Is it just me or is this just as non-sensical as multi-culturalism? Why would otherwise intelligent, educated people espouse such ridiculous ideas?

This all began with Descartes who proposed that man's soul was a 'ghost in a machine'. To Descartes it was the ghost that made man aware of being aware, etc. I had a philosophy professor who told me one time that Descartes was a *VERY* subtle philosopher and to exercise great care in how you go about interpreting him.

His driving passion, so to speak, was his fear of the Catholic Church and the Office of the Holy Inquisition. The royal treatment they handed out to Galileo was in Descartes' lifetime. Descartes' writing about the 'ghost in the machine' was one of those subtleties. Cartesian dualism might rest entirely on a mistaken interpretation of Descartes' writing. Suppose he wanted to criticize some aspect of Church teaching, such as the doctrine of the seperate existence of the soul. He could develop an argument that would lead to an obviously false conclusion that he assumed everyone as intelligent as he would get. Except nobody got it. He proposed that there was within man a ghost (the ghost in the machine) that was not present within animals. He then deduced that animals were not conscious. In line with this hypothesis he would have assumed that since it was obvious that animals are conscious and do feel pain that the theory of the ghost in the machine would stand as refuted and so would the church teaching about the soul (without him being guilty before the Inquisition). In other words, it was his intent to set up his own theory to fail in order to refute a church teaching. However, it backfired. He was taken for serious and so was his 'ghost in the machine'. Anyway, if I am right on this, so-called Cartesians are as thick as his contemporaries and just do not get it.

It should be obvious to any rational person that animals are conscious and do feel pain. If I can doubt that animals feel pain I can just as well doubt that fellow humans feel pain. What is the difference? They both emit noises when injured but since I am the only one I know for sure is conscious how can I be sure other humans feel pain? This shows that the whole argument amount animals not being conscious reduces to solipsism.

I should also add as a P.S. that many scientists would adopt animal non-consciousness as a methodological premise. In other words they would study animals, and sometimes humans, as stimulus-response machines. This would be, however, to reduce the number of variables in their behavioral model and not because they are really thorough going Cartesians.

At the end of the day they would still go home and play with their dog and yell at their cat.

Animal Mind?

This is an excerpt from a book written by one of the leading behavioral ecologists in the twentieth century, Donald Griffin.

There has been a recent explosion of scientific research on animal mentality. Are animals consciously aware of anything, or are they merely living machines, incapable of conscious thoughts or emotional feelings? How can we tell? Such questions have long fascinated Griffin, who has been a pioneer at the forefront of research in animal cognition for decades, and is recognized as one of the leading behavioral ecologists of the twentieth century.

With this new edition of his classic book, which he has completely revised and updated, Griffin moves beyond considerations of animal cognition to argue that scientists can and should investigate questions of animal consciousness. Using examples from studies of species ranging from chimpanzees and dolphins to birds and honeybees, he demonstrates how communication among animals can serve as a "window" into what animals think and feel, just as human speech and nonverbal communication tell us most of what we know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Even when they don't communicate about it, animals respond with sometimes surprising versatility to new situations for which neither their genes nor their previous experiences have prepared them, and Griffin discusses what these behaviors can tell us about animal minds. He also reviews the latest research in cognitive neuroscience, which has revealed startling similarities in the neural mechanisms underlying brain functioning in both humans and other animals. Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and explores its profound philosophical and ethical implications.

The point is, something is happening and something that is being measured scientifically. It's no longer something one just wonders about, but something that surrounds us everyday. We just have to listen, if we wish to.

The Debate for Animal Consciousness Continues...

Here's a paper written which spells out the dilemma taken from Behavior Online:

So, are some animals conscious? We see now that the question itself is irrevocably tied to the human conscious experience, because human consciousness is all we can imagine. Consider a more fruitful enquiry, in my regard: How do animals interact with each other and their environment, and why do they behave in those ways? We can construe answers to these latter questions without the equivocation that discussions of consciousness carry in cross-species analyses. Further, we can build models of animal behaviour from a base of absolutely minimal assumption, exploring their world as one alien to our own rather than searching it for qualities that are familiar to us. It may well be that some animal species outside Homo sapiens share sensory experience akin to ours; to that end we would like to treat consciousness not as an all-or-none quality but something that can exist to many degrees. One may object: How could we study animal cognition this way? It’s impossible to imagine being half-conscious, or a third conscious! Yes, exactly: animal mental states may be so foreign to us that representing them would be akin to conveying eleven dimensions on a flat piece of paper. Rather than leaping into a cursory attempt at knowing exactly how non-human animals think and feel, it may be wiser to study the consequences, which are readily observable, of their mental states. Let us treat animal minds as an unknown landscape that acquires shape by virtue of its shadows, which we see in their behaviour. Dawkins takes steps toward this approach at the end of her book, but her analysis of emotional expression in animals again presupposes in them a degree of human consciousness. After describing an experiment on hen behaviour, the author suggests that, in their effort to reach nest boxes, hens “experience a strong state of frustration at not being able to find one” (Dawkins 1998, 155). This passage may seem relatively innocuous, but in fact it assumes that hens are conscious animals with mental states so similar to our own that they can “experience . . . frustration.” Her description makes no sense unless we take it in stride that hens are conscious like we are, at least in the limited context of emotional response. It is precisely such slips of thought and diction that we must avoid.

Explaining human conscious experience is among the most daunting and exciting projects modern science faces. The progress we’ve made to that end is exhilarating and uplifting, but, tempted as we may be to do so, extending our intuitive inferences about human minds to animal minds is not conducive to understanding cognition outside our species. Why: because those inferences carry tacit assumptions about human mental worlds, which do not apply to non-human mental worlds. We will probably never be able to put ourselves into animals’ shoes, so to speak, but we can certainly build extensive, impartial records of animal minds’ input and output. By exploring the patterns in those input and output records, we can achieve a greater understanding of cognitive architecture outside Homo sapiens.

Literature Cited

Boyer, P. Religion Explained. New York, USA: Basic Books: 2001.

Dawkins, M. S. Through our eyes only? The search for animal consciousness.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 1998.

Dennett, D. C. Consciousness Explained. Boston, USA: Back Bay Books: 1991.

Why Bother?

Blogging on other sites, the comment or question about animal rights or animal consciousness, sometimes ends in "why bother" or "we should worry about ourselves first", etc., etc., etc. You know, man is the center of the universe.

My comment is that that viewpoint is the viewpoint which has gotten humanity into the state and condition it is today. The Burger King's slogan of the past "Have it your way", has worked its way into humanity. I guess you would call it instant gratification, without any responsibility.

It's the "me first", "me only" game. The truth is, we all depend on each other for our survival. Cars, Planes, Houses, sports, elections - you name it - depends on the help of others. What has happened though is that Madison Avenue advertising has found out what makes you tick, sexually or otherwise, and then candy coats the pill you are given.

For instance, there are a lot of anti-depressant drugs out there. While beautiful pictures of happy people and idyllic settings, there are words telling you that taking the pill can have serious effects, such as death. Music, music, death. Then there is Viagra. Sexual gratification. And yet people go blind from it. Hmmm. Music, music, encore, music...

Fortunately for mankind, there are a few, sometimes labeled 'rightists, right wing proponents' to name a few, that saw that there was a problem. Maybe it's just a guy who loves to scuba dive and sees less fish. Maybe its the fishing trawlers who take extreme risks because the 'ol fishin' grounds are empty. So we keep pillaging.

It is easier many times to look the other way. Thank God for those who don't.

Cultural Relativism????

I have been in a blog conversation with several people about the topic of Japanese Whaling.

A comment was made basically stating that since the killing of whales is part of the cultural tradition of Japan, somehow this makes it right. Another stated that as whales are no longer endangered and 'controlled killing' is the order of the day, that this somehow balances things.

It's amazing to witness individuals justifying the taking of life, especially when it is no longer necessary. Yes, we all eat meat to a greater or lesser degree. As we are at the 'top of the food chain' we do this. We also have the brains to change how we do it.

We are, by all standards, raping and pillaging our oceans. As the population on Earth grows exponentially, the need for food follows. By some good fortune, there are and have been a few people who have stuck out their necks to make a change, against powerful odds.

I am writing and started this blog because, for whatever reason, I have been sitting on something very real to me. Something others have experienced as a result of being around me. Something that changed my life for the better.

There has been arguments for and against the 'conscioussness' of all creatures. In my personal experience and at a very early age, I came to realize that all creatures, great and small, think and communicate. Maybe not the same as we do, but they do.

Some of us hear them, many don't or don't want to. Some just don't care. But as for me, I do care. I've been shouldered with the responsibility of talking about it and then doing something about it, cultural relativism or not.

The book will be released within the month and available through all major and minor bookstores. A good portion of the proceeds will go to helping and protecting our friends.

Do animals really talk?

I am wondering how many people out there have had personal and direct communication with animals. Where they have actually heard their thoughts and, where they have had learning experience from it. Do animals talk? What do you think?